First pitch: Maxwell passes concusion test and is cleared

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Although Astros manager Bo Porter didn’t put him in the lineup Friday for the opener against the Angels, outfielder Justin Maxwell was cleared to play three days after he suffered a concussion attempting a catch in right-center field.

“I’m good to go,” Maxwell said. “I got cleared from the MLB guy. I passed my impact test. I had it checked yesterday on the off-day, so I’m ready to go whenever I’m called.”

Porter routinely waits a day after an injured player is cleared before he puts him back in the lineup “just to give him another day just to make sure that there’s no setbacks, no ill effects, especially when you’re talking about a head injury,” Porter said. “But he passed all the tests and he’s available tonight if the game situation kind of dictates it.

“But I would rather give him a day to come out, run around, take batting practice and make sure everything is OK.”

Maxwell said he failed and did “pretty bad” on his base line test on Wednesday, but he passed all his tests Thursday.

“It’s pretty tedious,” Maxwell said of the base line test. “You have to sit in front of the computer and you have to do a bunch of word recollection. It shows you a list of 20 words. It shows it to you twice.

“Then you have to recall which words were on the list and which were not. They have a bunch of shapes like arrows and circles and stuff. You have to see whether or not you saw them previously. Then there’s some other tasks. Then at the end it asks you to recall the first group of words again and other shapes too. It’s pretty tedious.”